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Ethical Digital Marketing – Using the Golden Rule for ROI

“Stick em up! It’s the poll-ease!” Have you been a good digital marketer, as in not naughty but nice? Are digital marketing services turning the corner as a whole and providing the kinds of services to clients that they really deserve?

It doesn’t take a Matt Cutts to know that spammy link-building is not only outdated and doesn’t work, but it will actually get your clients thrown out of SERPS! And how about those negative keywords you’ve been meaning to add? Burning a little ad spend on those broad match terms that aren’t yielding any results? “Oh but it’s only a small percentage of spend,” you might be tempted to think. Time to trim the fat and break out the old checklist to make sure you are doing your job. After all, you are the best online marketer your clients could get for cryin out loud.

How Do I Know if My PPC or SEO Marketer is Doing a Good Job?

In some cases this may be easy to spot, but in some instances there may need to be special checkpoints setup to track success and find ways to consistently improve efforts whenever possible. Here’s a quick and easy checklist of some high level buzzwords by engagement type, for marketers and business owners, to help ensure everyone is on the right track.

Quick Checklist

Tracking & Reporting – make sure tracking is setup, Google Analytics and other necessary tools to help accurately report and measure success KPI’s. Have a plan to understand dynamics of reporting changes and keep the metrics transparent. You should be seeing metrics like CPA, ROAS, CPC, KW Rankings. GA will track your sales or leads generated from specific campaigns but you should have some understanding of how ad spend relates to sales.

Campaign Structure – Whether you are optimizing PPC or SEO, you should have carefully bundled “themes” that capture the relevancy of the landing page with proper ad-copy that is engaging, compelling, and contains a clear call-to-action path. Have all groups bundled for flexibility of optimization, and be sure to optimize meta & page level elements as they affect both organic rankings and quality scores in paid search.

KW Bidding – are you setup for automated bidding with 3rd party tools or within the publishers. In most cases this is free and you shouldn’t have to manually manage medium to larger accounts – use a bid tool to lower cost and increase performance instantly. Got Google Conversion Optimizer?

Campaign Structure – Whether you are optimizing PPC or SEO, you should have carefully bundled “themes” that capture the relevancy of the landing page with proper ad-copy that is engaging, compelling and contains a clear call-to-action path. Have all groups bundled for flexibility of optimization.

Proper Channel Setup – Allocating budget across platforms should be done in a way to ensure you are not spending too much in channels that bare no fruit. Be sure to know which channels are available – optimize our budget across them accordingly and know what works, what doesn’t, and then fix or stop.

You Had Me at Get Rich Quick

Treat your marketing philosophy like you would any other life situation. If you think you can a earn a lot of money fast, you just might be right, but if you think you are going to get rich overnight then think again about the company who makes that promise. Avoid SEO agencies that guarantee #1 ranking, they are pretty much always the ones that will scam you with some keyword ranking that is #1 but doesn’t have any traffic or impact on your real business sales.

If you are a marketer competing with these companies then never fear, just ask your client to get a specific list of recommendations from the company that is offering to do their work for 1/20th the price – then show them your recommendations and explain why they need to have all of the items buttoned up on the checklist in order to rank according to search engine policy. Show them some competitive kw rankings from Moz and the domain authority of each of the competitors down the list. Provide a strategy to achieve specific goals, map how to best reach the goals, and show what kind of revenue opportunities warrant investments in your recommendations. Understanding the ends can put more fear into the hearts of those who seek to get rich quick with bad companies who have no plans or real data to share, then a sound decision can be made more confidently and tactfully.

Keep Your Client/Agent Relationship Strong & Prosperous

Marketers that provide top quality service for their clients should get rewarded with long-term engagements and referrals from those clients. This will keep those marketers prosperous, and the continuity of the marketer staying on with the account will reap economies of scale as the experience grows and the tactics to succeed get better and have more impact.